Road to Disunion

Far from a monolithic block of diehard slave states, the South in the eight decades before the Civil War was, in William Freehling''s words, "a world so lushly various as to be a storyteller''s dream." It was a world where Deep South cotton planters clashed with South Carolina rice growers, where the egalitarian spirit sweeping the North seeped down through border states already uncertain about sl...